“The driver is not consumerisation per se, but giving employees the ability to use information more effectively, the ability to be more flexible to achieve a better work-life balance, and the ability to access the right information at the right time, which has proven to be a big competitive advantage,” he said.

However, this has not been without its challenges. “One of the biggest challenges has been managing the change within IT in terms of support, security and cost,” he said.

McKeown said organisations should start small and expand as knowledge and experience grows. Cushman & Wakefield started by inviting employees to buy their own devices. It then provided corporate emails to those devices.

“At first, we empowered users to choose their own devices, layered in a company data plan, and provided best-endeavour support,” he said.

While this approach worked well in the US, McKeown admits that there has been some pushback in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, where employees would prefer the company to provide the devices.

In line with the “start small” approach, the company has chosen to support only one version of Android on one device, where employees prefer a company-supplied device.

McKeown said organisations should also talk to their mobile service providers about data plans and costs when starting to mobilise the workforce.

“There is a lot of competition in the mobile data market, and we found our providers were willing to help us get to our future state, which meant we could migrate 7,800 BlackBerry users to a choose your own device programme at neutral cost,” he said.

It is important to ensure security measures do not affect the user experience

McKeown also advised organisations to expect to use four to seven times more mobile data than before, and plan for that by building relevant data plans, including roaming, into contracts, and to educate employees on how to use data allocations effectively.

He said companies should also expect to “sell the change” because change is not accepted by everyone. “Emphasise why the change is important for the business,” said McKeown.

When formulating mobile policies, he said it is important to involve all the business stakeholders such as HR, legal and finance.

“But because most users will not read the policies, security and risk are important components in regular employee education programmes,” he said.

While security controls should be fit for purpose, McKeown said it is important to ensure security measures do not affect the user experience, otherwise they will go around the controls.

As a final point, he said companies should expect a huge increase in the use of company Wi-Fi and should plan accordingly to ensure there is enough Wi-Fi capacity to meet increased demand.

“I am not saying what we have done is all working perfectly or that there is not still a lot of work to do, but hopefully our experience will provide some guidelines for other companies facing similar challenges,” said McKeown.

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